Co-host of “The View” Whoopi Goldberg responded to the backlash she received over her comment about the Holocaust.
During an interview with Stephen Colbert Monday, Goldberg acknowledged it “upset a lot of people.”
She explained, “I feel, being Black, when we talk about race it’s a very different thing to me. So I said I thought the Holocaust wasn’t about race. People got very, very, very angry and still are angry. I mean, I’m getting a lot of mail from folks and very real anger.”
Goldberg said she thought it was “a salient discussion because as a Black person I think of race as being something that I can see.”
She continued, “People were very angry, and said no, we are a race. And I understand. I felt differently. I respect everything everyone is saying to me. I don’t want to fake apologize. I am very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying. And because of it they are saying I am anti-Semitic, and denying the Holocaust, and all these other things that would never occur to me to do.”
Watch her comments below:
Whoopi Goldberg says she’s “very upset” that Holocaust remark about race was “misunderstood.”
— The Recount (@therecount) February 1, 2022
“People were very angry and they said ‘no, no, we are a race,’ and I understand … I felt differently, I respect everything everyone is saying to me and I don’t want to fake apologize.” pic.twitter.com/5K0MQntk5w
Goldberg told Colbert if “the Klan is coming down the street and I’m standing with a Jewish friend, I’m going to run, but if my friend decides not to run, they’ll get passed by most times because you can’t tell who is Jewish,” adding, “You don’t know.”
Suggesting the Nazis “had issues with ethnicity, not with race,” Goldberg continued, “Because most of the Nazis were white people and most of the people they were attacking were white people, so to me, I’m thinking, How can you say it’s about race if you are fighting each other? So it all really began because I said, ‘How will we explain to children what happened in Nazi Germany?’ I said, ‘This wasn’t racial, this was about white on white,’ And everybody said, ‘No, no, no, it was racial,’ and so that’s what this all came from.”
Her co-hosts pushed back on the comment during an episode of the show Monday.
Ana Navarro told Goldberg the Holocaust is about “White supremacy.”
Joy Behar noted the Nazis “considered Jews a different race.”
Several on Twitter voiced their frustration with Goldberg.
